It’s Microsoft’s biggest franchise on the Xbox and Halo 5 has more than lived up to expectations. Just one week after launching worldwide, Halo 5: Guardians has become the fastest-selling Xbox One exclusive game to date. A staggering $400 million in global sales includes both the game itself and and hardware. The Halo themed special edition Xbox One and controller, helped push the franchise to over $5 billion since launching back in 2001.

Gamers have now clocked up more than 21 million hours of total gameplay, including 12 million hours in campaign mode alone. Multiplayer is something Halo is known and loved for and is also being well recieved with 9 million hours played, with nearly 7 million multiplayer matches played across Arena and the all-new Warzone mode.

Launching a video game continues to become a massive event, much like feature films, launching the title correctly is key to its success. This time Microsoft pulled out all the stops with a massive live stream that lasted more than 6 hours and featured interviews with the developers at 343 Industries, voice talent and of course the face of Xbox, Major Nelson.

“Halo 5: Live”, the name for the Halo 5 launch event, earned a Guiness World Record for the most watched video game launch broadcast, with more than 330,000 unique streams on the evening of the broadcast. Additionally, content from the broadcast generated 5.5 million total views throughout the week. Thanks to some fancy work with the analytics, Microsoft say this resulted in a spike in digital sales of Halo 5, helping it to become the best-selling digital game ever in the Xbox Store for an opening week.

“The success of ‘Halo 5: Guardians’ is a testament to the innovative work from the entire team at 343 Industries to bring this instalment to Xbox One and the incredible community of fans who have come to love the story, characters and gameplay central to the franchise,” said Phil Spencer, head of Xbox. “The game represents all the possibilities of Xbox One and has earned its place as the anchor title in the greatest holiday games line-up in Xbox history.”

Of course playing the game for fun is just the start, some gamers are about to compete in the Halo World Championship which features professional players as young as 13 years old. The competition will run December through March and be divided into five regions, with the best players from U.S. and Canada, Europe, along with the Middle East and Africa, Greater Asia, Latin America, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

Competitors are playing for their slice of a massive $1.5 Million prize pool, which thanks to the magic of crowd funding continues to grow daily. If you want to know more, then head over to halo.gg.

If you haven’t already read our review, make sure you do that and if you haven’t got the game already, Halo 5: Guardians is available now for a RRP of A$99.95 at the normal retail stores in Australia as well as via digital download on the microsoftstore.com or straight from the Xbox One.